and some very fast three-card-monte shuffiing by manager Billy Martin to conceal his total lack of a bullpen or a dependable infield. ThIs summer, some of the Oakland starters faltered a bit, but the club picked up the slack by hit- ting a hundred and four home runs- enough to lead the league. The A's won the first-half, demi-divisiona] pennant of the split season, and their combined two-part record of sixty- four wins and forty-five losses was the second-best in baseball this summer- second only to that of the luckless Reds. The crowds poured out in Oak- land not just in response to victory, I should add, but thanks to an enthu- siastic campaign of team marketing and inspired public relations ("Billy Ball" and some upbeat, comical televi- sion trailers for the club were part of it) by the club's chief executives-the for- ty-one-year-old president, Roy Eisen- hardt, and the thirty-one-year-old ex- ecutive vice-president, Wally Haas- who also hit upon the radical idea of leaving the team strategy and tactics entirely in the hands of their experi- enced and victory-obsessed manager. Elsewhere this summer, Cleveland fastballer Len Barker pitched a perfect game against the Toronto Blue Jays -the first nobody-on -base effort in the past thirteen years. An even more startling string of zeroes came up dur- ing an April game played by the Rochester Red Wings and the home- team Pawtucket Red Sox, of the Inter- national League, which was called at 4:07 A.M., with the score tied, 2-2, at the end of thirty-two innings. The contest ran eight hours and seven min- utes, eclipsing every minor- or major- league record for longevity and instant slumps: the Pawtucket designated hit- ter, for instance, went hitless in eleven trips to the plate and fanned eight times. The game was resumed in June, before a very large audience of history-minded reporters, not includ- ing me, for I already knew -I knew-what would, and did, happen: one of the teams (Pawtucket, it turned out) won it in the very first, or thirty-third, inning. It was a year of superior pitching in many quarters. The twenty saves and 0.77 earned-run average of the Yankees' hulking and end- lessl y entertaining fireman Goose Gossage were topped, at that, by Milwaukee's Rollie Fingers, whose 1.04 earned-run average and 67 past Stan Musial's old NatIonal League mark of 3,630 lifetime hits; the event was widely celebrated, since it came on the day that play resumed in August, but to me it seems hardly more than another click on the Rose- mobile odometer. How much more fun it would have been to see Rose knock off still another two-hundred-hit sea- son, per haps, instead of the hundred and forty blows he had to settle for, or to think about the forty-five or fifty homers that Mike Schmidt might have whacked (he had thirty-one), or to watch Montreal's terrific rookie out- fielder, Tim Raines, sprint away to a hundred stolen bases or more, instead of his seventy-one. And so on There is more cause for distress when one looks at the team standings. The league bodies were under no obli- gation to split off the first sector of the games after the strike and declare the remainder a separate competition. They did so, of course, to create the artificial stimulus of a brand-new, sec- ond-chance-for-all pennant race, which almost guaranteed that the four first-half divisional winners would play without motivation or zeal through the remainder of the summer, since they were already guaranteed a place in the new post-season pre-play- offs, and that some other clubs would be done in by the built-in defects of the sudden scheme. This was exactly what did happen. The Yankees, Phillies, and Dodgers, each the leader in its division up to June 12th, ran off records of 25-26, 25-27, and 27-26 in post-strike play, and even Oakland's 27-22 second-half record was far off its earlier 37-23 performance. The Brewers, Royals, Expos, and Astros captured second-half divisional titles, but if the two seasons had been kept one, as prudence and fairness should have dictated, the finalists would have been the Cardinals and the Reds in the National League, and the Brewers and the A's in the American. The Cincinnati players must now somehow live with the knowledge that theIr 66-42 over-all total was the best in either league, and that they missed tying the Dodg- ers in the first half only because of a postponed but unreplayed game against the Giants, in which they led by 6-0 before the rains came. This irony is matched, or perhaps surpassed, by the arrival of the Kansas City Royals in the playoffs, thanks twenty-eight saves and six wins In relief were the prime ingredient in bringing the Brewers to the playoffs for the first time. The Astros' Nolan Ryan pitched his fifth lifetime no-hit- ter (agaInst the Dodgers, in Sep- tember), which sets him alone on this eminence in baseball history (he and Sandy Koufax had held the previous mark of four), and his earned-run average of 1.69 was the lowest in the league since Bob Gibson's 1.12 in 1968 Steve Carlton set a new Nation- al League lifetime mark of 3,148 strikeouts, but he trails Ryan (3,249) and Gaylord Perry (3,336) in lifetime whiffs, since both of them worked for some years in the American League as well. Ryan's achievement it seems to me, should fix him once and for all in the firmament of pitching immortals. He is pitching better than ever, batters report, thanks to his increasing use of a first-class curve to complement his searing fastball, and since he is stil1 only thirty-four years old, he appears to have an excellent chance of erasing Walter Johnson's lifetime and all-time record of 3,508 strikeouts. Tom Seaver, by the way, posted a splendid 14-2 won-and-Iost mark for the Reds. He has his eyes fixed on the lifetime three-hundred-victory level-a club with only fourteen members so far- but he is still forty-one games away, and since he is thirty-seven years old, he must be brooding about the ten or twelve starts he missed in June and July, because of the strike. But not as much, surely, as Gaylord Perry, who is forty-three and boasts two hundred and ninety-seven wins, and has just been dropped by the Atlanta Braves from their 1982 roster. All these diminished numbers-the asterisks-infect the 1981 records at many levels, which may account for so much talk just now about lifetime, as against single-season, performances. Pete Rose, it will be recalled, moved